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More than just a season, winter has become a metaphor for the dark side of life. Most of us accept the winter blahs as normal and wait for spring. But for some, seasonal doldrums can be a real problem.

My mother, a tradition-confused West Coast Jew, might have been onto something. She insisted on having a large Christmas tree in the living room, but she refused the usual panoply of ghastly colors. Instead she used exclusively white bulbs. "Colored lights are for the goyim," she would say with the slyest of smiles. When pressed, she would add, "Bright white is better for your spirits." (Another Jewish tradition -- justifying any peculiar taste on the basis of health reasons).

But was my mother right? Were the bright white Christmas tree bulbs therapeutic? Would votive candles have done the job? Or a trip to Florida? Or spending the winter in a brightly lit casino? Are TV and computer monitors evolutionary answers for the winter blahs? I don't doubt that we get bummed out at this time of year, but is this a specific biological condition or a more metaphysical malaise?

In the late 1970s a South African psychiatrist, Norman Rosenthal, first correlated winter depression with decreased exposure to light. After moving to New York in the dead of winter to begin his psychiatric residency, Rosenthal felt tired, sluggish and overwhelmed by his work schedule. When spring arrived, his mood lifted; he felt renewed and energized. The obvious explanation (especially for a shrink) was the change in latitude -- the shorter days, longer nights. Rosenthal blamed his depression on dim lights, not the big city.

He decided to test his theory. At the National Institutes of Mental Health he exposed subjects with a history of winter depression to several hours a day of artificial light. Many reported improvement in their symptoms. In the early 1980s, after his tests, the term "seasonal affective disorder" (SAD) was coined.

Symptoms of SAD are very similar to those of non-seasonal clinical depression: change in appetite, weight gain, drop in energy, tendency to oversleep, difficulty with concentration and irritability. The key factor in diagnosing SAD, though, is its seasonal pattern: The above symptoms fade away with the arrival of spring and return in the fall.

Curiously, the single physical symptom that seems to correlate best with SAD is the strong craving for sweets. Rosenthal and others theorize that people with SAD have difficulty in regulating serotonin levels during the winter and that their craving for carbohydrates is a way of compensating. (Carbohydrates are believed to increase the level of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and lower-than-normal levels of serotonin are correlated with clinical depression.) Perhaps this is the evolutionary rationale behind those dreadful fruitcakes.

Next page | Even the euphoric get depressed in standstill traffic